The Institute for Animal Health's primary goal is delivering high quality fundamental
strategic and applied research into a number of diseases which are either resident in the
UK or prone to threat to the UK.
The Institute employs just under 400 staff and our annual running budget is around £30M.
The Institute has a number of large scale projects and many of these revolve around
improved diagnosis of major pathogens in the development of new or better vaccines against
these livestock diseases.
The biggest current success, I guess, would be our provision of scientific data to a number
of stakeholder groups and working with those stakeholder groups include Defra and the National
Farmers Union to ensure that the UK remains completely free of bluetongue virus during
2008.
The saving to the UK was measurable in terms of hundreds of millions of pounds.
The bluetongue virus first arrived here in 2007 and that was the first occasion that
bluetongue virus had ever been in this country and, indeed, it was part of an outbreak which
was the first time the bluetongue virus had ever been in Northern Europe and in predicting
the arrival of bluetongue virus in Northern Europe and in the UK and in getting rid of
bluetongue virus once it was here is an area of work that we at the Institute for Animal
Health have been much involved with.
We're the national, the European Union and the OIE World Reference Laboratory for bluetongue
so we are very much at the forefront of bluetongue research throughout the world.
One of the main things we do here is we carry out all the testing for the farmers so any
time an animal is tested once it has come into the country after it has come from an
area where bluetongue has been circulating, we will be testing that animal.
Any animal that is going abroad, we will be testing it.
Any animal that is showing clinical signs of bluetongue, we will be confirming exactly
whether its bluetongue and then we will be confirming exactly what serial type it is.
In sheep bluetongue virus causes a severe disease.
It causes severe swelling and also haemorrhaging and also causes mortality up to about 50 or
60%.
The work carried out here at the Institute for Animal Health on bluetongue virus has
had a direct and massive impact upon the UK economy.
It has been estimated that the work carried out in 2008 alone saved £500M and 10,000
jobs.
Controlling a disease today does not guarantee control tomorrow and climate change is predicted
to bring more pests and diseases to the UK.
A £100M investment in new laboratories will therefore form the UK's frontline against
emerging threats and old enemies.
Global warming is becoming more of an issue and that means that a number of other diseases
are also likely to extend into regions where they were previously not present because the
increase in temperature affects the insects which transmit these diseases.
There are a number of other diseases that this transmits and one of the most severe
is African horse sickness.
This, as it name implies, is an African disease but its showing increasing activity in Africa
and it has a track record of previously invading Europe.
It kills approximately 80% of horses that it infects.
That would be cataclysmic to the equine industry in the UK.
I think the Institute for Animal Health fills a really important gap in the scientific capability
of the UK and it fills that gap because there are areas of science that are just to big
and too difficult for the commercial sector to engage with.
One of the past successes has been the development of a unique vaccine against a major poultry
parasitic disease called coccidiosis
...and that vaccine which has now been introduced and used for 20 years is now the biggest selling
vaccine of its type anywhere in the world.
The work at the Institute for Animal Health, I think, is undoubtedly recognised internationally
as being incredibly strong and important.
We worked with a number of stakeholders again to eliminate rinderpest on the planet which
will be formally acknowledged in 2010.
Rinderpest is a virus that causes a disease called cattle plague and has killed millions
and millions of animals across the world.
At the Institute for Animal Health we have taken a lead role in carrying out the eradication
of this virus.
Recently there have only been certain areas in the world where it has been confined to
but since 2001 there have been no cases of rinderpest so we were pretty sure that this
virus has been eradicated.
At the moment smallpox is the only virus that has been eradicated but hopefully rinderpest
will be the second.